Padraic Pearse, oh poet,

The songs of a fool you did not sing.

Hung on your gallows,

The tyrants let you die.

But what for your song?

Were you hungry for violence?

 

For the love of Republican Government

You sung your heroes-songs

Of mother Erin.

And the Banshee keened,

Oh did the shade keen.

 

We, the land where your ye fellowmen fled

We stand berated by kings and princes

Who do now claim to have royal blood.

Are they Bourbon or Hapsburg

Perhaps they are, but America,

Mother Maria,

She to whom Erin’s Exodus fled,

We have no King.

O sweet child

I came to tell you a truth.

Many will listen to the song

That sounds much like the winds and reveries of us all.

For men want to hear their hearts pipe to them from the other hearts.

 

But, to draw into the deep darkness,

To pour out truth is far more fruitful.

For, when acceptable in the eyes of the LORD

The strong winds of the crowd

To whom we chaunt,

Err like Echo, and it chaunts back;

Understand it is not our reflection to choose

In the poesy we pluck…

Rather, it is the heart of another

And their wisdom.

 

Whom, though, yours grew dark,

I ask you, “Was it I?”

And if that answer is yes,

I am sorry.

The carnal mind is full of sweetness,

But we try our furnace,

And let the embers flow over our souls

To melt its dross.

 

Skim it with the instrument.

Set it free.

For your prior truths were far more precious to me.

The professor pompously speaks his formulae;

Yet, he does not understand it.

He, rather, performs by rote his routine

A show, an ethos,—cries out foul on the students

Who do not trust him to give them the answers.

He fools millions, yet we understand it because a computer told us.

The mystery of this invention,

That what it says must be divine rite,

The professor uses it as an example

To teach, but he does not know what he teaches.

The Academy men sought out wisdom.

Our modern Academy, men remember what was wise

But becomes as vacuous as an empty vessel.

For, to have knowledge without understanding

Is a kind of sin we have passed down through our generations.

We are lost

Lost to the fissure of war

Broken and turned.

Our leaders wish us starved

Or broken under combat.

They stir the Medes

Miles upon the great divides

Of sea and land and plateau.

 

Chariots thunder their wheels;

Great men and armies sail across oceans.

Why did the modest man get silenced?

Why did his breath get stolen from his pipe?

Why do we cower and be afraid

Of a phantom in the night?

As if death, if chosen,

Were not the better option.

 

Death haunts us,

His specter looms into every window.

Rather than make us fat, and nourished,

And allow the little Indians to eat,

The little Arabs and Medes and Persians

For our fat they must die.

 

Why do men follow the will of governments

Who send them overseas to do harm’s bidding?

Why do they march to wardrums

And hate what they will not understand?

Why, why, do we contemplate war

In an age which could prosper every man?

Like Piaget’s cognitive development

There is a spiritual development.

 

It begins that the man or woman cannot understand good and evil.

Like the Child with the cognitive inability to perceive objects

Of equal weight in different forms

A man cannot, at the lowest stage of the development

Understand what is good or evil.

 

Then, after developing the sense of what is good and evil

The man or woman still has to process what forgiveness is.

They cannot, after perceiving evil or good

Understand the aspect of mercy or forgiveness.

 

After developing the sense of when it is right to forgive

The man or woman begins to instill a sense of God

Or higher authority. They cannot, at first

Perceive the higher authority, until they acquire the discernment to perceive it.

 

After finding God exists, the man or woman begins

To discover whether God loves them,

And begins to understand the nature of divine laws and consequences

Or if the God of the Universe is disinterested

Until they perceive that the higher authority interacts with man and does love them.

 

After perceiving that the higher authority interacts with man

And He does love them, they come to the recognition of the moral law

Which best fits that divine love.

And soon they perceive that it is Jesus.

Irish souls in ancient days

Fought war with poesy’s might.

The voices of the souls did sing

They fought for their God blessed right.

 

The press was wrought with gross intent

To make a cautious song.

Yet the Irish rebels sung their verse

And had stole their right from wrong.

 

Guns were words and bullets rhyme

The streets laid the foundation of brick.

Freedom was our rebel’s song

And freedom we sought to fix.

 

The strong have stolen our meat from us

As we chewed upon the leg.

The warriors’ verse was the nations’ trust

The battle was word for bread.

I see him weep.

I weep too.

It’s all gone.